"The problem of Bit Hilani" is the title of one of the parts of Chapter 5 of the first volume of the Hellenistic Temple of Oxus in Bactria (Southern Tajikistan), a monumental work of two scientists [Litvinsky and Pichikyan, 2000] - Boris Anatolyevich Litvinsky and Igor Rubenovich Pichikyan, with whom the author of these lines was lucky enough to work together in the Department of History and Culture of Ancient Tajikistan. Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Unfortunately, I. R. Pichikyan has not been with us for a long time. B. A. Litvinsky published only one volume for the second time (Litvinsky, 2002), while the third volume (Litvinsky, 2010) was not destined to survive. This work is dedicated to the bright memory of Boris Anatolyevich.

Keywords: bit hilani, New Assyrian springs, Hittite architecture, Amurru, Syria, Mari, columned portico, gate entrance, origin and evolutionary development.

"Bit hilani" is a term known to us mainly from New Assyrian sources (acc. also [CAD, 6, p. 184-185]), in which it was used to designate a certain (non-Assyrian) type of architectural structures. It would seem that there are no problems: the term is there, the buildings are there! However, since the end of the XIX century. (when the term "bit hilani" was first associated with one of the buildings of Dur-Sharrukin [Puchstein, 1892, p.2-3]), the controversy about what is hidden under it does not subside. B. A. Litvinsky could not stay away either. For the sake of justice, it is necessary to say that there is probably no more detailed bibliographic review of concepts related to the appearance and development of buildings of the "bit hilani" type in Russian. However, Boris Anatolyevich was interested in the problem of bit Hilani primarily in the context of the genesis of the forms of Iranian fire temples, so in his review he focused on quite specific architectural elements, adhering in general to the point of view of R. Koldevey, F. Ohlmann, F. Vakhtsmut (Litvinsky, 2000, p. 247), i.e., that in the modern world of the fire temples, the architectural history is technically referred to as "bit hilani". I, on the contrary, want to refer to the texts, i.e. to the term "bit hilani" directly.

The earliest mention in Assyrian texts1 refers to the second half of the 8th century BC (during the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III): "Bit Hilani is a kind of Hittite palace for my pleasure in Kalhu ² I built"³. The phrase used here ("likeness of a Hittite palace") is absolutely standard (occurs a sufficient number of times) and does not, at first glance, raise any questions. But the same phrase in a number of texts is accompanied by a surprisingly revealing clarification: "which in the Amurru language they call bit hilani." The term amurru( amerru), used in old Babylonian times to refer to the Amorites (lit. "people of the West"),

¹ But only in the Assyrians, not in general.

² Kalhu Assyrian springs - modern Nimrud.

³ hereafter, the translation is mine.

In the New Assyrian texts, the name of the nomadic Semitic tribes that lived on the vast expanses of the Syrian steppe refers to Syria in general. It turns out that for the Assyrians of the second half of the eighth and first half of the seventh centuries BC, everything was exactly the opposite in comparison with the views of modern archaeologists and art historians, who, starting with the "stage"⁴ work of G. Frankfort [Frankfort, 1952], refuse to see buildings of the bit Hilani type among the Hittite imperial architecture. At the same time, the written Anatolian material gives us the Hittite "courtyard, fence", "gate, entrance" and, finally, the Luwian hieroglyphic "gate", from which the New Assyrian borrowed from the late Hittite as the type of structure ⁵.

The simplest, at first glance, way to remove the contradiction between the new Assyrian sources containing explanations of" bit Hilani " is to recognize that by this we should mean Syria ⁶, especially Northern Syria, since this ethnonym originally applied to the area of historical settlement of the Hatti tribes (in the bend of the Galis River and on the plain south of Lake Tuz) was used in many countries. 2nd millennium BC is used in relation to the population of the Hittite kingdom, which in the second half of this millennium extends its hegemony to the city-states of Syria, conducts military operations in Asia Minor, and for some time puts Mitanni in a dependent position. Political activism also contributed to the growth of Hittite cultural influence. Therefore, it is not surprising that from a certain time the Assyrians began to use the term also in relation to the population of Palestine and Phoenicia. At the turn of the 13th and 12th centuries BC, as a result of the movement of the so-called sea peoples, the Hittite Kingdom was destroyed. On the site of the Hittite-dependent territories in northern Syria and the southeastern part of Asia Minor, kingdoms were formed, somewhat conventionally called Late Hittite ⁷. Most of them were conquered by Assyria in ^the early 1st millennium BC8. However, the population of the new Hittite states was not a direct carrier of the" official " Hittite culture of the empire, Hittite was no longer the official language, and instead of cuneiform script, Luwian hieroglyphic writing was used, which is reflected in the text. However, we will have to admit that Luwian was assigned by the Assyrians to the Amurru languages solely on a geographical basis, or to see after the O. R. Gurni [Gurni, 1987, p.186] is a New Assyrian term of Syriac origin. In the latter case, we are talking about the only tablet from the Mari archive, dating from the XVIII century BC, on which it was read. "On the other hand, it is far from the first time that the Mari archives reveal phenomena that are almost or not at all attested in other sources of the same era and are traditionally attributed to much later periods" (Arkhipov, 2009, p.12). And the only time such an early use of the term was discovered, it should not be ignored, especially given the context of its use: the son of the Assyrian king Shamshi-Adad I, who was placed on the throne in Mari, Yasmah-Addu writes to his father about the sins of the former ruler, including the replacement of the Assyrian structure in Mari with "your house, which the former kings built, he destroyed and bit Hilani built "[ARM I 3: 10']. O. R. Gurney believed that the XVIII century BC was a time "when Hittite Asia Minor had not yet begun to exert a noticeable influence on the civilization of the Syrian plains" (Gurney, ibid.). However, the discovery of Hittite place names in documents from Ebla is even earlier

⁴ According to B. A. Litvinsky [Litvinsky, 2000, p. 248].

⁵ V. L. Tsymbursky [Tsymbursky, 1994; Tsymbursky, 2006], who unfortunately also passed away, has repeatedly addressed this topic in his research. By the way, there was a time when V. L. Tsymbursky and B. A. Litvinsky worked in the same department.

⁶ As the authors of CAD do [CAD. Vol. 1. Pt. II, p. 183; CAD. Vol. 10. Pt. II, p. 301].

⁷ Or Neo-Hittite.

⁸ And the Assyrians (like modern researchers) continued to refer to them conventionally in the old way.

According to V. L. Tsymbursky, time ⁹ makes us "take seriously the possibility of opening Hittites in the Euphrates region of the days of Hammurabi" [Tsymbursky, 2006, p. 19]. He considers Bit Hilani to be one of them, the construction of which in Mari "becomes a symbol of cultural and political challenge to the Mesopotamian overlords of the city, reflecting a certain reorientation its upper reaches - not to the north with its rising Hittite "principalities"?" [ibid.].

It is generally accepted that there is no convincing archaeological evidence for the existence of buildings of the bit Hilani type among the monuments of imperial Hittite architecture (especially in the first half of the 2nd millennium BC), ¹⁰ but in Syria, according to a number of scholars, ¹¹ their elements appear already in the XVIII century BC, and by the end of 2The genesis of this architectural form is almost complete (Fritz, 1983). There is no doubt that the New Assyrian "bit Hilani" dates back to samples that could have been directly seen by the Assyrians during military campaigns (for example, the palace and religious buildings of Tell Khalaf and Zanjirli ¹²). But there are serious doubts about the argument of art historians for the position that the Syrian "bit hilani" could not have been the result of an adaptation of the Hittite architectural model. Let's try to answer the question of what this model might represent.

The possibilities of etymological explanation of Hitto-Luwian proposed by V. L. Tsymbursky [¹³] leave an impression of the characteristics of the Hittite-Luwian national architectural model, the oldest denotation of which was supposed to be " structures of the "gate entrances" type " [Tsymbursky, 2006, p. 19-20], which later evolved into buildings, and adapted replicas of which quickly spread to the territory Syria. If we highlight the features of the Hittite architectural concept, based on the preserved monuments, then, first of all, we should talk about the accentuation of entrances and the active use of windows. By the way, the Luwian hieroglyphic sign that reads just shows a tower with a round entrance and a window in the upper tier. G. Frankfort therefore believed that this sign, since it does not have the image of a columned portico, once again confirms the fact of ignorance of the "bit Hilani" imperial Hittite architecture [Frankfort, 1952, p. 127]. It was easier for him to recognize the discrepancy between the term and the construction traditionally associated with it [ibid, p. 128], rather than to see in the columned portico the result of the evolutionary development of the original concept of the principal accentuation of the entrance.

For almost 120 years, disputes have been going on, but it is still too early to put an end to the question of the origin and evolution of buildings like "bit hilani". Perhaps the most fruitful approach in the light of all this is to try to re-evaluate the role of the Hittite component of this process.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ARM - Archives royalcs de Mari (= TCL 22 - ).

CAD - The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

TCL - Textes cuneiforms du Louvre.

⁹ XXIII century BC

¹⁰ And what is there is only the result of an erroneous reconstruction of a poorly preserved building in Bogazkei. "For example, G. Frankfort [Frankfort, 1952] highlights them in the Yarim-Lim Palace in Alalakhs (modern times). Tell Atchana).

¹² The plans are presented in: [Litvinsky and Pichikyan, 2000, tab. 63-1, 64-1,3,4].

¹³ The general meaning of the nest depends on the base *H(e) il- / Hyel, in his opinion, "the internal cavity of the body and tubular entrances and exits from it" [Tsymbursky, 2006, p. 19-20], which clearly corresponds to the complex of meanings " courtyard (often internal)", " entrance, gate", "protective extension extended in front of the entrance and connected by vestibules to the courtyard".

list of literature

Arkhipov I. S. Iron in texts from Mari (the first half of the XVIII century). Vestnik drevnoi istorii [Bulletin of Ancient History]. 2009. N 3.

Litvinskiy B. A. Temple of Oks in Bactria (Southern Tajikistan). Vol. 2. Moscow: Vostochnaya literatura Publ., 2002.

Litvinskiy B. A. Temple of Oks in Bactria (Southern Tajikistan). Vol. 3. Moscow: Vostochnaya literatura Publ., 2010.

Litvinsky B. A., Pichikyan I. R. The Hellenistic Temple of Oxus in Bactria (Southern Tajikistan). Vol.1. Moscow: Vostochnaya literatura, 2000.

Tsymbursky V. Zametki po etrusskomu yazyku i kul'tury [Notes on the Etruscan language and Culture]. Proceedings of the International Colloquium April 9-11, 1990 (Moscow). XXIII-th Whipper Readings / Under the general editorship of L. I. Akimova. Moscow: Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts; St. Petersburg: Gos. Hermitage, 1994.

Tsymburskiy V. L. Frako-khepo-luviyskis formalnye sovmeshcheniya: ikh tipy i vozmozhnosti khronologii [Frako-khepo-luviyskis formal correspondences: their types and possibilities of chronology]. Indo-Iranian linguistics and typology of linguistic situations. Collection of articles for the 75th anniversary of Professor A. L. Grunberg (1930-1995). Saint Petersburg: Nauka Publ., 2006.

ARM I

CAD. Vol. 1. Pt. II; Vol. 10. Pt. II.

Frankfort H. The Origin of the Bit Hilani // Iraq. Vol. 14. No. 2. 1952.

Fritz V. Die syrische Bauform des Hilani und die Frage seiner Verbreitung // Damaszener Mitteilungen. Bd. I. Mainz am Rhein: Dcutschcs Archaologisches Institut, 1983.

Puchstcin O. Die Saule in der assyrischen Architektur // Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archciologischen Instituts. Bd. VII. 1892.

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